


Raise Your Glass

by IncurableNecromantic



Category: Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
Genre: M/M, OR IS IT, One-Sided Love, Pining, University AU, emotionally significant Roman glass, professors au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-25
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2019-01-05 04:40:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12183057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncurableNecromantic/pseuds/IncurableNecromantic
Summary: Whale bones, Roman glass, statues of demons, piles of potsherds... After so many years in cahoots with Professor Thatch, Professor Whitmore is the owner of a few souvenirs that mean more to him than they should. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as no one finds out how much they mean.(Someone finds out.)(It's not one of the potsherds.)





	Raise Your Glass

**Author's Note:**

> A birthday gift for navigatingreality on Tumblr.

Tonight, Preston B. Whitmore is 56 years old and the professor of economic theory at Georgetown University. He is in a bar called The Tombs, sitting in the booth he’d liked to sit in as an undergraduate himself and conspicuously not making eye contact with the current students as he drinks his way through two cocktails at the same time. The fire roaring in the red brick fireplace is throwing unsteady light up on the cherrywood tables and chairs. It’s becoming late.

Sitting across from Preston is Thaddeus Thatch, 56 years old and the professor of pre-Mesopotamian archaeology. Thaddeus is drinking one cocktail, too slowly, and pilfering sips and slugs from whichever glass Preston doesn’t currently have in his hand.

They’re tucked in an old crevice, one of the least-refurbished portions of the restaurant; while the rest of the place has transformed by increments, their portion has remained in a pleasant state of mid-seventies semi-dilapidation. This is because Preston had made it clear that the bar will continue to pull a profit from them (and a considerable one) so long as the red pleather seats remain a little cracked and the water rings on the table show their age.

Preston and Thaddeus have not seen each other in four months. They’re still sizing one another up, quietly, in long but skittering looks. At least Preston is. He hasn’t caught Thaddeus at it, but then there’s little about Preston that’s changed in those four months.

Preston looks down at the little package in his hands, shaking it a little to test its weight. “Is it a potsherd?”

“No.”

“If it’s a potsherd I’m going to give it to the geologists and see how long it takes them to lick it.”

Thaddeus’ closed eyes and mouth sit on staggered longitudes across his face. The conscious degree to which Thaddeus seems unimpressed by Preston’s witticisms makes Preston’s heart fill a little more with hot blood; he has been missed, and Thaddeus is trying not to smile. “It’s not a potsherd.”

“I’m asking because the last six presents were potsherds and I’m running out of places to put them,” Preston explained. “You can give me another potsherd if you really want to, but I’m probably going to end up using it as an avant-garde ash-tray.”

“I use them as shoehorns,” Thaddeus replied. He leans back in the booth, watching Preston perform certain preliminary tests on the package, including shaking, sniffing, and listening.

“I’m going to try that. Not with this potsherd, though. I’m going to use this one to slash someone’s tires. Or maybe I’ll decorate the edge of my flowerbeds and confuse the life out of some future archaeologist. Or–”

“By the simmering blood of Christ,” Thaddeus moans at last. He drops seemingly-insensible to the cushion of the booth seat, legs dangling off the edge and arms flung over his face. He kicks his legs straight out; narrowly misses one of the newer waiters; sticks his feet out like a corpse. “I should’ve stayed on sabbatical!”

“Another round?” the newer waiter asked—not so new he didn’t know a pair of regulars. Preston gave him a half-smile and a half-wink, flicking the muscles around his right eye without actually closing his eyelid. “Right. I’ll bring them out.”

“Thanks, son.”

Now unobserved, Preston grins broadly and feels for his pocket knife. He is taking the piss: last time Thaddeus had brought him a potsherd, yes, but also a very handsome whale rib. The look Thaddeus had given him when Preston asked if the five-foot-tall box contained a potsherd had been much funnier than the look Thaddeus had given him for this little parcel, but he couldn’t stop making the joke now. It was a meme. One must follow the rules.

Preston catches up his knife, flicking it easily open and snipping through the butcher’s twine holding the package closed. Thaddeus perks up at the noise of the knife and curls himself up, sitting up to watch Preston open his present.

Thad looks good. The wilds of Nepal had agreed with him, all the climbing and yak milk and blazing sunlight roasting him over to a deep brown and putting a little weight on his horse-boned body. Preston had stayed home, sanely, teaching a summer session and staying cheerfully sun-starved.

Now that Thad was back, Preston’s pallor wasn’t going to last. At the very least they’d lose a few days roasting on bar patios, and then what? Scorched to a crisp.

Preston licks his dry lips. Adventure, soon, if he’s any judge. Thaddeus will want him along for the ride to who-knows-where, to cover bills and boost them into first-class and of course for conversation. This time, Preston is inclined to go.

“Enough stalling,” Thaddeus grumbles. “Not everyone’s gifted with the patience of Jacob.”

“I don’t think they’d let me sit here for seven years, slowly opening this.”

Preston pulls off the brown paper and stuffs it into the pocket of his jacket, finding inside a cardboard box. He sets the knife on the table and gently prises open the lid, levering it off like the slab from a tomb.

He peers at the contents for a moment or two, just to be sure that he’s seeing what he’s seeing. He smiles.

“Thad,” Preston says, “You got me a screaming demon. I’m touched.”

Thaddeus grins and Preston plucks the small statue out of the box, setting him up and pointing him towards the students so they’ll get the full brunt of miniature demonic fury. Come in his bar, will they.

“I thought it was the right thing, yeah. Pretty sure you’re not bedevilled half as much as you deserve.”

“You sure about that? I do teach economics.”

“Definitely not half,” Thaddeus nods. “Every time you look at this little fellow, remember that you will be tarred and possibly roasted on a spit in the great hereafter.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Or, if I’m tarred and roasted it won’t be by this guy. He’s cheeky. Got a sense of humor on him… he looks like the kind to let an enterprising chap slide.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Thaddeus says over the rim of Preston’s cocktail. “Now that I see him in an alcoholic context, I see what you mean. Damn.”

Preston splashes a little of one drink in an empty vessel and sets it up for the statue. Thaddeus combs his moustache with his fingers to hide his smile and doesn’t make a fuss when Preston steals back his cocktail and finishes it.

The newer waiter reappears and starts setting down the drinks.

“Do you want food?” Preston asks. The scotch rocks makes a soft click on the table.

“What are you having?”  

“That’s what I’m trying to determine.” Clink. The appletini.

“Crab dip?”

“Luxurious! We’ll take two, son—”

The third drink, Thaddeus’ gin rickey, hits the table wrong. It topples over, flooding across the shellacked wood towards Thad’s lap.

“Shi—!” Thad scrambles for an exit, but he’s not fast enough. Cold booze swamps him and he hisses, collapsing back in his seat and shaking his head.

“Oh my God,” the waiter says, going white. “I’m so sorry!”

“Could we get a few towels?” Preston asks, trying not to smile while he tosses Thaddeus his napkin.

“Of course, I’ll—”

“And the crab dip.”

“Yes!”

“And a long straw,” Thaddeus says, glowering at his lap. “Why waste?”

The waiter loses a few precious seconds trying to get the joke before leaping away. Preston hopes this one’s going to make it.

Thaddeus mops himself with the napkin and tsks, chucking the sodden fabric over towards the salt shakers at the back of the booth.  

“Yeargh. Here, give me your—”

“Hm? Wait—”

Thaddeus reaches out and seizes Preston’s pocket square between two fingers. Preston can barely wheeze as Thaddeus rips the flash of green cloth out of his chest, flickering the fabric through the air and letting a little shining thing fly out. It evades Preston’s clutching hands and plinks against the table.

Preston snatches the treasure back up, heart in his mouth, and checks it over for damage. He knows the speckles and sparks and flakes better than the veins in his wrists. When the light shines on it, the piece of glass is speckled blue and white, iridescent greens and purples flickering out to to form a rolling shimmer like that of a silver fish. If he turns it around and looks out at a light through it, it becomes a fragmented orange borealis, full of chips of amber and yellow, the purples now dark pink. With the light on it, it’s the moon; with the light through it, the sun.

He shouldn’t handle it much, and doesn’t, if he can avoid it. But he carries it around most of the time, wrapped up safely in his suit pocket. No one knows it’s there, usually.

Preston heaves a sigh of relief. It’s unharmed.

“S’blood, Thatch,” Preston grouses, tucking the glass back away in his pocket. “Warn a man the next time you go raiding his wardrobe.”

Thaddeus is staring, green pocket square dangling from his fingers. Preston lets an eyebrow twitch. Maybe the wet lap is doing some form of permanent damage.

“What was that?” Thaddeus asks.

“My pills,” Preston grumbles, reaching for the scotch. “Wipe your pants.”

Thaddeus drops the pocket square in his lap and furrows his brows. “What was that?”

“Nothing, it’s—”

But Thaddeus already has his fingers in Preston’s suit pocket, fishing around.  Preston slaps the back of his hand, but Thaddeus grabs the Roman glass and pulls it out, holding it up close to his spectacles.

Preston’s throat goes dry and he swallows the rest of the scotch. It’s not the first time he’s wanted to be swallowed by the Potomac mud, but he didn’t get where he is today without being able to keep his composure. He rolls the ice around in the cup and filches the demon’s portion of drink as Thaddeus squints at the glass.

Thaddeus flicks his eyes up. “I gave this to you.”

He did. Preston had met Thaddeus quite late in life, for two men who’d been in the same undergrad class at the same university. Somehow their paths had never crossed until one transformative staff meeting in ‘78, when a fresh-off-the-ferry Thaddeus had happily hauled three flaming pints of what proved to be antediluvian napalm in for the edification of the faculty and Preston was the only one who dared get close enough to speculate on its composition and the wisdom of having it in an enclosed space.

Back then, Preston had concealed his predilections beneath an eccentric but excusable interest in Greek literature, always secondary to his passion for a good old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone mechanical engineering lecture. The first expedition Thaddeus had ever dragged him along on took them to Greek Macedonia, where Preston had been free to gargle his way through a few Attic manuscripts and bits of historical economic treatises in the company of undergraduates while Thaddeus took his grad students to dig up tombs.

He remembered the nights in indigo, rich color carrying the fragrant air of the mountains and olive groves and the distant salt tang of the port of Thessaloniki. Glinting gold and blue dyes, sloe-eyed madonnas and hot beige dust, lamb and grey-green leaves that Preston did not stay long enough to watch turn fiery orange. Conqueror kings so thick on the ground you had clear tribute and atrocity by the shovelful just so you could drive without puncturing your tires on the edges someone’s long-abandoned phalanx.

Thrown into daily discourse with Thaddeus, Preston had been a lost cause after the first two weeks. By the time the summer was at its close, he knew he was never going to find a way out, not with a head full of memories of Thaddeus Thatch jumping naked into the ocean in broad daylight to wash off grave dirt and chomping through fistfuls of olives for breakfast and opening his heart and his real ambitions to Preston on a smoky patio on a weekend jaunt—faculty only—to Crete.

It was on a perfectly ordinary evening, spent sitting on the Kastra and looking out at the city, that Thaddeus offered him the glass. He'd found it the previous day on the dig, just one incarnation of the kind of pretty and age-old detritus these places were littered with like so many archaeologically significant snowflakes.

Thaddeus had passed it to him casually. “A souvenir. Better than those awful icons.”

“They’re not bad, they’re just cheap.”

“Well, here’s something actually one-of-a-kind.” Thaddeus had stretched out and said no more.

Preston had peered through the treasure at the melting sunset. It was a piece of Roman glass, forged centuries upon centuries ago by the greatest Western empire in the history of the world. What had it been? A cup? A dish? Perhaps just some little trinket, the outer borders of which had shrunk and splintered off as the empire herself collapsed. It had been sitting somewhere in the dust of this oft-repatriated crossroads, waiting for untold decades for a living hand to find it and bring it back to light. Now that hand had passed it into his.

But that had been ages ago. They’d been entirely different men. Or Thaddeus had certainly been, married and settled with an eight-year-old son.

Preston… well, he’d had more hair.

“You gave it to me, yes,” Preston says, now, in The Tombs, watching Thaddeus turn the piece around and around in his fingers. “I don’t seem to recall knocking you out and taking it by force, anyway.”

Thaddeus scrubs his moustache with his fingers. “You shouldn’t— why do you tote it around like this? It’s bound to break or fall out or something.”

Preston reaches out and wraps his fingertips around the glass. His hand brushes Thaddeus’ fingers. They’re warm, tan, maybe still dusted with Nepalese pollen or dirt. They’d clasped hands and patted shoulders when they met this evening, so the imprint of Nepal has already had its chance to find its way into Preston’s bloodstream. He didn’t need to refresh it.  

His throat’s still dry.  That waiter can’t come back soon enough.

Thaddeus doesn’t let go.

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Preston says. “I thought it’d be poor form to have it broken up to be remade as grills, but if you really don’t like me handling it as I do I’ll reopen the subject with my dentist.”

“One really big gauge, maybe.”

“Now you’re on the trolley.”

Thaddeus is covering his mouth with his hand. He hasn’t let go. Preston should drop it, because at any moment a young idiot might glance over and think they’re seeing Professors Thatch and Whitmore holding hands in the middle of a student bar. But it’s his glass, damn it, and it’s part of his essential accoutrement. His skin creeps, seeing it held up to the light for God and everyone to see.

“I really… you know, I thought you’d lost it.”

“Really?”

“Well, I mean, you keep everything else as a decoration in your house. I thought I’d find it, if I found it, mounted as a paperweight on some out-of-the-way desk or worked into a portion of a casement window somewhere. It never occurred to me that it might be rattling around loose.”

Preston rolled his eyes, even as relief began to prickle in his knees. Of course. Thaddeus wouldn’t care that such a thing mattered enough to be carried around on a daily basis—just that it was being carried around improperly.

“My house is nothing. Turn me up by my ankles and give me a shake and the treasure of the Sierra Madre will fall out of my socks. Now—”

“We should do a little better for you,” Thaddeus says. He finally moves, taking the Roman glass away and putting it in the pocket of his threadbare work shirt. “Pendant, maybe. Or a tie-pin. Or a ring.”

“No. Too large for a ring, I mean. I could get mugged and then shot when I spend fifteen minutes explaining that it isn’t an opal.”

“Hm. You have a point. Navel piercing, then.”

“Neck piercing. Something to decorate the wattle.”

“Let’s go back to this idea about grills.”

Preston opens and closes his hand. Thaddeus picks up the demon statue and puts it in his palm with a beatific smile.

“Thad—”

“No, leave it to me. I know a good jeweler who can set it in something age-appropriate. I need to see it mounted or I won’t have any rest. After all, if you’ve kept it all these years, I’d be heartbroken to hear it had disappeared when we go gliding down the Nile next semester.”

Preston flattens his mouth over the jumping of his pulse. The Nile? Well, well. Maybe he can make the case for Aswan, if Thaddeus doesn’t have big plans already in motion. It would be paradisiacal to spend a few weeks in an ancient garrison and marketplace, all mosques and Coptic cathedrals, Qubbet el-Hawa and the souq. There was something in the thought of stretching out on a felucca and talking Herodotus and Pliny the Elder into the wee small hours, winding down brown-green water under a gloaming lapis lazuli sky…

“Is that what we’re doing next semester,” he deadpans.

“Clearly not until this glass issue is settled. Now, where in hell are those extra napkins, would you imagine?”

Thaddeus turns out to be right. It takes a few days for the panicky feeling of reaching into his suit pocket and finding no glass to wear off, and the cold dread that Thatch had forgotten about it and run his shirt through the wash with un-emptied pockets doesn’t fully go away, but a few weeks later Thaddeus presents him with another small box as they sit in the faculty lounge.

The glass is roughly diamond shaped, long as the distal bone of his thumb and about half as wide at its broadest point. Set in darkened sterling silver, the glass is reformed in a manner he’s not entirely sure he loves, yet—after so many years as a contextless shard, it’s strange to see it given surroundings, resolved into a formulated item of identifiable jewelry. Its edges are no longer bordered by his hand. There is a wall between his dying skin and the glass’ undying radiance.

But he draws the chain over his head, settling the clasp against the back of his neck, laying the pendant across bare skin beneath his shirt, and… yes. All right. It weighs on his chest, a small pressure above his bones. He can feel it with him. It fits in its new place.

Thad doesn’t look up from his map of southern Egypt, but there’s a smile playing around his mouth. Preston returns to his writing. They're quite alone, for the moment.

He doesn’t bother to button himself back up just yet.


End file.
